Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet

I really don't understand why, in arguing that a common perception is not true, critics so often set out to prove that the complete opposite is actually the case. Matthew Sweet argues not only that Victorians aren't the stereotypical corseted, patriarchal, repressed, religion-obsessed, 'lie-back-and-think-of-England' race that period dramas present them as, but that they are in fact at least as liberated, free-thinking, sexually adventurous as we are, in some cases, more so. First of all, this isn't really the case, as the mindset of the time period was completely different from ours, and the language of 'more' or 'less' might simply not be appropriate in this case. The parallels that Sweet constantly draws between our present-day sex clubs, drinking, drug use, popular recreations (etc) and the Victorian ones in order to show that 'it's all the same really' are frankly irritating, ridiculous and condescending. Patronizing the reader is definitely Sweet's forte, his tone is unbearable. He begins an explanation with 'crudely speaking', implying that his readers lack his finesse and must have things explained to them 'crudely'. I didn't read the whole book (I wasn't interested in the history of the freak show), but in the sections I read, I counted four (four!!) completely unprovoked jibes against Virginia Woolf, basically through wilful misinterpretations of her writing. (Anyone who insults Virginia Woolf is immediately my worst enemy.) The reason is that Sweet traces (I don't know whether correctly or not) the origin of the repressed image of the Victorians to the Bloomsbury Group's portrayals and critiques of them. I thought that part was actually interesting and informative, and I think the book would have been vastly better if Sweet had focused more on the twentieth-century cultural necessity for creating this image, instead of criticizing and mocking it and devoting way too much space to detailed counterexamples. There's really no new argument in the book, he simply spits back (in 'crude' form), various scholarly arguments about the Victorian age, but presents himself as a god, who has come up with these interpretations for the first time or tweaked them slightly. All the while turning a blind eye (actually I would say firmly shutting both eyes) to anything that might seriously destabilize his 'argument'. A great example of this: not once, while demonstrating how the Victorians' attitude towards sex was akin to ours, does Sweet mention birth control. It is the widespread use of birth control that allowed (especially heterosexual) sexual relations to be seen as safe and often as casual fun in the modern world and made women's sexuality and pleasure less of a cultural taboo. This was not brought up at all, because that would mean acknowledging that Victorians could not possibly have had an attitude to sex comparable with ours, since sex for them was necessarily coupled with either children, venereal disease or both. Overall, an infuriating, terrible, condescending, completely ridiculous book that has some truth to its arguments only thanks to the research Sweet did.